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Daniel Clarke's avatar

Boy this takes me back. I went to work for IBM in Lexington, KY in 1979. My first job there paid $183/week and I placed typewriter parts into a plastic bin rolling down an assembly line toward the people who assembled the selectric typewriters. I was later promoted to an assembly position where I spent the next 6 years building Selectric typewriters while learning to be a programmer in the evenings. I’m always shocked when I run across one of those typewriters and your essay on it supports my belief that many are still out there whirring away and capable of functioning the way we built them to!

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Claire Polders's avatar

Your essay hums like the Selectric itself, steady and alive! I love how you embrace the typewriter not as nostalgia but as resistance, a way to reclaim slowness in a world that constantly demands reaction. As someone who also writes to think, I felt this piece in my bones. (But, no, I do not write on a typewriter, because I’m a nomad.)

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